PART I of this series asked what happened on 7 October 2023 — and found, among other things, that a significant share of the Israelis who died that day were killed by Israeli fire, under a military directive that treats capture as a fate worse than death. That was the anatomy of a single day. This part asks a harder question, and a longer one: why that day came at all.
The answer the world has been given is that it came from nowhere — an eruption of motiveless evil by people who hate Jews and hate the West, an attack with no history behind it and no cause but malice. That account is false, and it is false in a way that serves the people who tell it, because a 7 October that began on 7 October is a 7 October no one in power has to answer for. The truth is that the day had a history, and the history is long, and almost everyone with a stake in the conflict has a reason to want some part of it left unsaid.
This part tells it under one rule, and the rule is the whole point. The same law, the same standard of evidence, the same refusal to flinch, applied to every actor in turn — Israeli and Palestinian, occupier and occupied, the state and the militants who attacked it. Where a Palestinian crime is a crime, it is named as one. Where an Israeli crime is a crime, it is named as one. Nothing here excuses what Hamas did on 7 October; the deliberate murder of civilians is a war crime whatever drove it, and this series has already said so and will say so again. But explaining is not excusing, and a massacre that is never explained is a massacre that is certain to recur.
So begin where the story begins — not in 2023, and not in 1948, but before either, with the land and the people who were already on it.
Before 1948 — What Was There
At the start of the twentieth century, the territory that would become Mandate Palestine held roughly six hundred thousand people. About 94 per cent were Arabs — Muslim and Christian. The Jewish community of Palestine numbered perhaps thirty thousand, most of them members of the old yishuv: religious communities long established in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias, descendants of Jews who had lived in the land for centuries, in some cases since the destruction of the Second Temple. They were a recognised, settled population. They were also a small minority of the country they shared with the Arab majority around them.¹
That changed slowly under Ottoman rule and then quickly under the British. The First and Second Aliyahs — the great waves of Jewish migration from Eastern Europe between roughly 1882 and 1914 — were driven, in the main, by the pogroms of the Russian Empire and the collapse of Jewish security in the Pale of Settlement. Theodor Herzl published Der Judenstaat in 1896. He did not write it in response to a Muslim crisis. He wrote it after the Dreyfus Affair in France, in the heart of Christian Europe, where the case for Jewish security under European liberalism had just shown itself to be brittle. The Zionist movement was a European movement, conceived as a European response to European antisemitism, and the country it chose for its solution was already inhabited.
In November 1917 the British government, then preparing to take Palestine from the Ottomans, issued the Balfour Declaration. The text was sixty-seven words long. It promised His Majesty’s Government’s “best endeavours to facilitate the achievement” of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, with the proviso that nothing should be done that would prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities. Those communities — the 94 per cent — were not consulted. They were not named. They were referred to as “existing non-Jewish communities.” A majority the document decided to ignore. The declaration was made by a foreign government, on behalf of one population, about land belonging to another. It was the single most consequential sentence in the modern history of the region, and it was written by people who had never lived in it about a future they would not be there to administer.²
The British Mandate, awarded by the League of Nations in 1922 and operative until 1948, was the structure within which the consequences of that sentence had to be worked out. The Mandate’s terms incorporated the Balfour language directly. Britain was charged with facilitating Jewish immigration and “close settlement by Jews on the land,” while simultaneously safeguarding the rights of the Arab inhabitants. These two duties were not, in any practicable sense, compatible. Jewish immigration meant Arab dispossession. Arab self-government meant the end of unrestricted Jewish immigration. Britain administered the contradiction for twenty-six years. It did not solve it. It was not designed to.
Inside that structure, two events from the Mandate years belong in any honest account.
The first is the Haavara Agreement, signed on 25 August 1933 between the Jewish Agency, the Anglo-Palestine Bank, and the economic ministries of Nazi Germany. The agreement enabled German Jews emigrating to Palestine to recover a portion of their assets — assets the Nazi regime would otherwise have confiscated outright — by way of forced purchase of German export goods, which were then sold in Palestine and the proceeds returned to the emigrants in Palestinian currency. The arrangement was a direct economic transaction between the Zionist movement and the Hitler government. Between 1933 and the outbreak of war in 1939 it was a major factor in moving roughly sixty thousand German Jews out of Germany and into Palestine. It saved their lives. It was also profoundly controversial at the time. The Revisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky opposed it. The mainstream American Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany was undercut by it. The historian Edwin Black, in The Transfer Agreement, documented the depth of the rift it produced inside Jewish political life. The agreement saved Jews and it kept Reichsmarks circulating, and both of those things were true at the same time. It also contributed materially to the demographic shift that produced the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939 and the British policy response that followed. We name it here because no honest account of how the Jewish population of Palestine grew in the 1930s can leave it out.³
The second event is the Arab Revolt itself, and the British response to it. From 1936 to 1939, the Arab population of Palestine rose in sustained rebellion against British rule and against the scale of Jewish immigration the Mandate was facilitating. The revolt was put down — by British forces, with Jewish auxiliary units fighting alongside them, with collective punishment, with the dynamiting of Arab homes, and with the destruction of the political and military leadership of Palestinian Arab society. By the time it ended in 1939, the Arab community of Palestine had been systematically demilitarised, its leadership exiled or imprisoned, and its capacity for organised resistance broken. This is the population that would face the 1948 war eight years later. The Yishuv — the Jewish community in Palestine — would face the same war with its own armed forces (the Haganah, with the Irgun and Lehi to its right) battle-hardened, organised, and trained. The asymmetry of 1948 was not produced in 1948. It was produced by the British Mandate’s decade-long differential treatment of the two populations under its administration.
Britain’s failure on the question of Jewish refugees has to be named in the same section, for the same reason. In May 1939, with European Jewry already in mortal danger and the war months away, Britain issued the White Paper. The paper capped Jewish immigration to Palestine at seventy-five thousand over the next five years, after which further immigration would require Arab consent. The paper was issued in the same year the St Louis, a German ocean liner carrying nine hundred and thirty-seven German Jewish refugees, was turned away successively by Cuba, the United States, and Canada — a Western failure of which the White Paper was the British contribution. The cap held throughout the war. European Jews trying to reach Palestine — Jews who had nowhere else to go, because no one would take them — were turned back at the British naval blockade. After the war the policy continued. As Foreign Secretary in the postwar Labour government, Ernest Bevin rejected the Anglo-American Committee’s 1946 recommendation that one hundred thousand Holocaust survivors be admitted from the displaced-persons camps of Europe. He continued the interception of immigrant ships and the detention of their passengers in camps on Cyprus. In July 1947 the Exodus 1947, carrying roughly forty-five hundred Holocaust survivors, was intercepted off the coast of Palestine and — on Bevin’s own direction — sent back to Germany. The image of Holocaust survivors being deported by the British Navy to the country whose camps had killed their families became one of the defining images of the period. Bevin made his views known in remarks that have not aged well: that the Jewish refugees were “pushing to the front of the queue,” and that the Americans pushed for them to be admitted to Palestine because they did not want them in New York. Britain failed those refugees, in a structural way, at every stage from 1939 to 1948. That failure is a British failure first. It is also a Western failure that Britain happened to be administering.⁴
In February 1947, with the postwar situation untenable, Britain announced it would refer the question of Palestine to the United Nations and end its Mandate. The General Assembly appointed a Special Committee on Palestine. The Committee’s majority recommended partition. On 29 November 1947, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 181. The resolution proposed two states — one Jewish, one Arab — with Jerusalem and Bethlehem under international administration.⁵
The Resolution allocated approximately 55 to 56 per cent of the territory of Mandate Palestine to the proposed Jewish state and approximately 42 to 43 per cent to the proposed Arab state, with the remainder constituting the international zone around Jerusalem. At the moment of the vote, Jews comprised roughly a third of the population of Palestine and owned, by Mandate land registry figures, between 6 and 7 per cent of the land. The territory allocated to the Jewish state contained an Arab population of approximately four hundred thousand and a Jewish population of approximately five hundred thousand — a near parity, in a state intended to be Jewish. The territory allocated to the Arab state was, by contrast, almost entirely Arab. Of the sixteen districts of Mandate Palestine, the plan allocated nine to the Jewish state. Only one of those nine had a Jewish majority.⁶
The Arab Higher Committee rejected the plan. The Arab states represented at the UN voted against it. The reasoning, as the Arab delegations stated it on the record, was that a population owning 7 per cent of the land had been allocated 55 per cent of the territory, and that within that territory the indigenous Arab majority had been placed under the sovereignty of a Jewish state by an international body whose authority to do so they did not recognise. The Jewish Agency accepted the plan publicly, while making clear that the boundaries on offer were not the boundaries the Yishuv considered final.
Israel makes this argument: a state was on the table in 1947, Palestinian leadership rejected it, and the catastrophe that followed flows from that refusal. Accept partition, the argument runs, and there would be an Arab state today. Reject it, and you chose the war.
The argument fails on the law. The right to self-determination is not a prize awarded for accepting a particular map. It is an inalienable right of a people, recognised in the United Nations Charter and later codified as the first article common to both human rights covenants, and affirmed by the International Court of Justice as an obligation owed by all states. A people does not forfeit it by refusing terms drawn up without them. Resolution 181 was a recommendation of the General Assembly. It carried no binding force, and the Assembly had no authority to partition a country against the will of the majority who lived in it. The Arab population of Palestine — the majority of the inhabitants of the country, the owners of the overwhelming majority of its privately held land, the population whose political leadership Britain had crushed less than a decade earlier — was being asked to ratify the partition of its own country, the placement of nearly half a million of its members under foreign sovereignty in the proposed Jewish state, and the loss of the agricultural and coastal heartland on which its economy depended, in exchange for sovereignty over a non-contiguous remnant. The plan was a settlement at the expense of the majority for the benefit of the minority, written by a foreign assembly that did not contain a single Palestinian representative. The Arab rejection was, in substance, the act of a colonised people refusing to ratify the terms of its own dispossession. That refusal was theirs to make.⁷
That refusal does not license what followed. The point of this article is to apply the same standard everywhere. The Arab leadership’s military reckoning was catastrophic — the Yishuv’s forces were better armed, better led, and better organised than the irregular Arab forces and the conventional armies that entered the war in May 1948, and the result was a war the Arab side could not win and that the Palestinian population, in particular, would pay for. The strategic choice was a disaster. Other choices were available, and the leadership made the one that compounded the harm. But that is a different argument from the argument that the rejection of partition was a moral failure. It was a strategic failure. It is a calamity that the two are routinely conflated. They are not the same thing.
By the time partition was put to the vote, the structure of the conflict was already in place. The land was inhabited by two populations. One was indigenous and demilitarised. The other was a project of European Jewish settlement, undertaken in flight from European Christian violence, on land Britain had promised to people who did not live there. The British administration had failed both. The Arab population had been broken by 1939. The Jewish refugees of Europe had been left to drown in 1939, and would be turned back at sea in 1947. Partition was the international community’s attempt to resolve a contradiction it had spent thirty years administering. The resolution was rejected. The war that followed produced the Nakba, the founding of Israel, and the conditions that would make 7 October 2023 thinkable. We turn to that war next.
The Nakba
The war that began with the partition vote and ran through to the armistice agreements of 1949 produced two outcomes that have shaped everything since. The first was the establishment of the State of Israel on roughly 78 per cent of Mandate Palestine — considerably more than the 55 per cent the partition plan had allocated to it. The second was the destruction of Arab Palestine as a society. Palestinians call it the Nakba — the catastrophe. The name is accurate.
In the course of the war, roughly 750,000 Palestinians — about half the Arab population of the country, and the large majority of those living in the territory that became Israel — were expelled or fled. The United Nations’ own statistical expert, working in 1949, put the figure at approximately 711,000. Benny Morris, the Israeli historian whose archival work on this is the most cited, gives a range of 600,000 to 760,000. The figure of three-quarters of a million is the one most commonly used, and it is defensible at the centre of that range. More than four hundred Palestinian villages were depopulated and physically destroyed — the standard reference, Walid Khalidi’s All That Remains, documents 418 by name; the atlas compiled by Salman Abu-Sitta brings the figure above 500. The villages were not merely emptied. Most were demolished, their stone houses dynamited or bulldozed, to ensure there would be nothing to return to. Forests were planted over many of the sites. Israeli towns were built on others.⁸
How this happened is the single most contested question in the historiography of 1948, and an honest account has to say so rather than pretend the dispute is settled. The disagreement is not about whether the expulsions occurred — that much is documented beyond reasonable dispute, including by Israeli historians working in Israeli archives. The disagreement is about whether the expulsions followed a government policy or were the byproduct of military operations.
The focal point is a Haganah operational order known as Plan Dalet — Plan D — finalised on 10 March 1948. Ilan Pappé, an Israeli historian, reads it as a blueprint for ethnic cleansing: in his account the plan spelled out that the Palestinians had to go, and its execution was the systematic depopulation of the country. Walid Khalidi read it the same way, as a master plan for the conquest of Palestine. Benny Morris reads it differently. Morris — and this is the point that matters — is not a partisan of the Palestinian cause. He is an Israeli Zionist who has, at times, defended the expulsions of 1948 as a regrettable necessity of state-building. And yet Morris’s own archival work documents what he calls a strategic-ideological anchor and basis for expulsions, carried out by front, brigade, district, and battalion commanders who claimed military necessity, with the plan providing them formal cover after the fact. Morris finds, from the Israeli records, a detectable atmosphere of transfer in the statements of Zionist officials and officers from the spring of 1948 onward. What he resists is Pappé’s word “blueprint” — the claim of a single premeditated master order.⁹
The distinction matters, and it cuts in a direction that does not help the maximalist Israeli case. Whether the expulsions flowed from one master plan or from a doctrine that licensed commanders to clear hostile and potentially hostile villages as they advanced, the outcome on the ground was the same: three-quarters of a million people removed, four hundred-plus villages destroyed, and a deliberate state policy — adopted in cabinet within weeks of independence — of preventing their return. The argument between Pappé and Morris is an argument about the degree of central premeditation. It is not an argument about whether it happened. On that, the Israeli archives and the Palestinian testimony agree.
The expulsions were accompanied, in a number of documented cases, by massacres. The most notorious is Deir Yassin. On 9 April 1948, fighters of the Irgun and Lehi — the armed groups to the right of the Haganah — attacked the village of Deir Yassin, west of Jerusalem, which had signed a non-aggression pact with its Jewish neighbours and was keeping to it. At least 107 villagers were killed, including women and children, some shot, some killed when houses were dynamited with people inside. The figure requires a note of caution that runs in an unexpected direction. In the immediate aftermath, the death toll was inflated to around 254 — and it was inflated not only by Zionist groups claiming a victory but by the Arab Higher Committee’s own broadcasters, who believed that publicising an atrocity would spur the Arab states to intervene. The official who ordered the exaggeration later told the BBC it was the worst mistake they made: the broadcasts spread terror, and the terror accelerated the very flight they were trying to prevent. The honest figure is at least 107, and it does not need inflating to be a massacre. Deir Yassin had a demographic effect out of all proportion to its size: news of it, true and exaggerated together, was one of the single largest accelerants of the flight that followed.¹⁰
That the expulsions are now documented at all is owed substantially to a generation of Israeli historians who went into their own state’s archives and reported what they found. Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, Avi Shlaim, Tom Segev — the group loosely called the New Historians — dismantled, from Israeli sources, the founding national story that the Palestinians had simply left of their own accord at the urging of Arab leaders. They did not all reach the same conclusions, and they have feuded bitterly since; Morris has moved rightward, Pappé leftward, and Shlaim has criticised both. But the central factual correction stands, and it came from inside Israel. This is worth stating plainly for a reason that holds across the whole article: the most damaging evidence against the comfortable version of 1948 was produced not by Israel’s enemies but by its own scholars. That is the opposite of propaganda. It is what an honest reckoning looks like.¹¹
Out of the catastrophe came a legal claim that has never been resolved. On 11 December 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 194. Its paragraph 11 resolved that refugees wishing to return to their homes and to live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid to those choosing not to return. The General Assembly has reaffirmed this resolution more than a hundred times since. Here, as with the partition resolution, honesty requires naming the dispute over its force. Israel and a number of legal scholars argue that Resolution 194 is a General Assembly recommendation, non-binding by its nature, conditioned on the refugees’ willingness to live in peace, and therefore not the source of an enforceable right of return. The Palestinian position, supported by the majority of international legal opinion and reinforced by the right of self-determination and by the customary-law right of a person to return to their own country, treats it as the anchor of a right that Israel has refused for over seventy years to honour. What is not in dispute is the underlying fact the resolution was responding to: a population was displaced, its property was taken, and it was not permitted to come back. The State of Israel adopted the policy of preventing return in a cabinet meeting in June 1948, before Resolution 194 existed, and has maintained it since.¹²
One more displacement belongs in this section, and it belongs here because the same standard that names the Palestinian catastrophe must name it too. In the years during and after 1948, the Jewish communities of the Arab and Muslim world — communities in many cases older than Islam itself — were uprooted. Between roughly 1948 and the early 1970s, somewhere in the order of 800,000 to 900,000 Jews left or were driven from Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Morocco, and elsewhere. In some countries this was outright expulsion: Egypt and Libya drove their Jews out. In others — Iraq, Yemen, Morocco — it was the cumulative work of persecution, pauperisation, the stripping of citizenship and property, and episodes of mob violence, of which the Farhud in Baghdad in 1941, which killed between 150 and 180 Jews, was an early and infamous example. This was a real displacement and a real wound, and the Arab states that carried it out bear responsibility for it.
But it is not the same as the Nakba, and the honest course is to say why rather than to twin the two for rhetorical convenience. The two displacements differ in mechanism, in timing, and in outcome. The Palestinian expulsion was concentrated, carried out within months by the forces of a new state on the land those refugees were native to, and was followed by a deliberate policy of preventing return. The Jewish exodus ran over more than two decades, across many separate states, and was — this part is not often said — actively sought and facilitated in significant measure by Zionist organisations whose explicit purpose was to bring those Jews to Israel; the airlifts from Yemen and Iraq were Israeli operations. And the outcome diverged completely. The Jews displaced from Arab lands were received as citizens by a state built to absorb them, where their descendants today make up roughly half the Jewish population. The Palestinians displaced from Israel were absorbed nowhere as citizens, were denied return, and remain — they and their descendants — the largest and longest-standing refugee population in the world. Both peoples lost homes. One was given a country. The other was given camps. To call these the same thing is to misdescribe both.¹³
From 1948 to 1967
The armistice agreements of 1949 ended the fighting without ending the war. They drew lines — the Green Line, the line that would later be called the 1967 borders — but they settled nothing. Israel existed and would not be unmade. The Palestinians had been dispossessed and would not be made whole. The Arab states had lost and would not accept the loss. Into that frozen hostility came nineteen years of raid and reprisal, and at the end of them, a six-day war that redrew the map again and created the occupation that is still running today.
The raids came first. Across the armistice lines, Palestinian refugees — many of them living in camps within sight of the land they had been driven from — crossed back, at first to recover possessions and harvest abandoned fields, then increasingly to attack. By the early 1950s these crossings had hardened into organised armed infiltration, the fighters known as the fedayeen, operating mainly out of Egyptian-controlled Gaza and the Jordanian-held West Bank. They killed Israeli civilians. The toll mounted through the decade, and the fear was real: Israeli border communities lived under genuine threat, and the dead were genuinely dead.
Israel’s answer was the reprisal raid, and the reprisal raids produced their own atrocities. The clearest case is Qibya. On the night of 14 October 1953, in retaliation for a fedayeen attack at Yehud that had killed an Israeli woman and her two children, an Israeli force built around Unit 101 — the special unit commanded by a young major named Ariel Sharon — crossed into the Jordanian-held West Bank and attacked the village of Qibya. At least sixty-nine villagers were killed, two-thirds of them women and children. Forty-five houses, a school, and a mosque were destroyed; UN observers found bodies in doorways and bullet marks on the doors, evidence that residents had been kept inside as the houses were dynamited. The UN Security Council, in Resolution 101, expressed the strongest censure of the action. Ben-Gurion went on the radio and told the world the Israeli army had had nothing to do with it — that the raid was the work of enraged civilians. It was a lie, and the documentary record has long since established it as one.¹⁴
Both halves of that paragraph are true at once, and the one standard requires holding them together. The fedayeen attacks were real and killed civilians; nothing about the dispossession of 1948 made the murder of an Israeli mother and her children at Yehud anything other than a crime. And Qibya was a grossly disproportionate reprisal against a village, condemned by the world, lied about by the state that carried it out. This is the pattern that runs through the whole conflict, already visible by 1953: a real grievance, a real crime in response, a real atrocity in response to that, and each side pointing to the other’s act as the thing that licenses its own. The article’s task is not to find the side with clean hands. There is no such side. It is to apply the same rule to both, and the same rule says that killing civilians is a crime whoever does it and whatever was done first.
The cycle escalated for fourteen more years and culminated in June 1967. The causes of the Six-Day War are still argued over — Egypt’s expulsion of the UN peacekeeping force from Sinai, Nasser’s closure of the Straits of Tiran, the massing of Arab armies on the borders, and the bellicose rhetoric of annihilation coming out of Cairo and Damascus, set against Israel’s decision to strike first. What is not argued over is the outcome. On 5 June 1967 Israel launched a pre-emptive attack that destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground, and within six days it had defeated the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria and tripled the territory under its control. From Egypt it took the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip. From Jordan it took the West Bank and East Jerusalem. From Syria it took the Golan Heights. Somewhere between 280,000 and 325,000 more Palestinians were displaced from the West Bank, many of them refugees from 1948 now made refugees a second time. The Palestinians call 1967 the Naksa — the setback. By its end, every remaining fragment of Mandate Palestine was under Israeli control, and roughly a million Palestinian Arabs had passed under Israeli military rule.
What the law required of the victor was set down five months later. On 22 November 1967 the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 242, the document that has framed every negotiation since. Its architecture was the principle of land for peace: in exchange for the recognition and security of all states in the region, Israel was to withdraw from territory it had occupied in the war. The resolution also reaffirmed, in its preamble, the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war — the bedrock principle that you do not get to keep what you take by force.
But Resolution 242 carried inside it a deliberate ambiguity that has been fought over for sixty years, and honesty requires laying it out from both sides rather than resolving it by assertion. The English text calls for withdrawal “from territories occupied in the recent conflict” — with no definite article. The French text, equally official, reads “des territoires occupés” — “the territories.” The difference is the whole argument. Israel and its supporters read the English wording as deliberate and decisive: withdrawal from some territories, not all, with the final borders to be settled by negotiation toward “secure and recognised boundaries.” The Arab states and the Palestinians read it, with the French text behind them, as requiring withdrawal from all the land taken in 1967. The drafters confirmed the omission was no accident: Lord Caradon, the British ambassador who steered the resolution, and Arthur Goldberg, the American who shaped it, both later said the missing “the” was chosen on purpose, and the records show that several draft versions containing the word “all” were put forward and defeated. I am not a lawyer and this article will not pretend to settle a dispute that the lawyers have not settled. What can be said plainly is narrower and harder: whatever the exact acreage 242 required Israel to return, it did not authorise Israel to keep the territory permanently, and the principle in the resolution’s own preamble — that territory may not be acquired by force — points in one direction only.¹⁵
The Arab states answered first, and they answered with refusal. At a summit in Khartoum in the late summer of 1967, the Arab League issued the resolution remembered for its three no’s: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiation with Israel. The maximalism was total, and it was a gift to those in Israel who had no intention of trading the new territory for anything. If the other side will not negotiate, you are not refusing to negotiate by keeping what you hold. Khartoum did not cause the occupation. But it supplied, for decades, the alibi for it — and the same standard that names Israel’s territorial appetite has to name the Arab rejection that fed it.
The question Resolution 242 left open — what becomes of the land taken in 1967 — would not be answered in 1967. Israel gave its first definitive answer thirteen years later, and the answer told you everything about the decades in between. On 30 July 1980 the Knesset passed the Basic Law declaring Jerusalem, “complete and united,” the eternal capital of Israel — an act the Israeli Supreme Court itself read as the annexation of East Jerusalem, captured from Jordan in 1967. The UN Security Council responded with Resolution 478, which censured the law in the strongest terms, declared it a violation of international law, pronounced it null and void, and called on member states to withdraw their embassies from the city. The vote was fourteen to nothing; the United States abstained rather than support its ally’s act, but did not vote to condemn it. Israel rejected the resolution and kept the law. This is the first hard instance of a pattern that will define everything after it: the occupied territory was not held pending a settlement. It was absorbed. The annexation of East Jerusalem was the template, and the bulldozers were already moving on the rest.¹⁶
The Mutual Denial of Peoplehood
Underneath the wars and the resolutions runs something older and harder to negotiate than any border: each side’s refusal to grant that the other is a people with a claim. But the two refusals are not the same refusal, and the difference matters, so we are going to be precise about it. One side denied that a people existed. The other denied that a state was legitimate. Those are different denials, and only one of them is what it is usually called.
Start with the Israeli denial, because it is the cleaner case. In June 1969, in an interview with the Sunday Times marking the second anniversary of the Six-Day War, the Israeli prime minister Golda Meir said that there was no such thing as Palestinians. The line is usually quoted as a slur and left there, but the full passage is worse than the slur, not better. Meir’s argument was that there had never been an independent Palestinian state, that the land had been “southern Syria” and then a Palestine that included Jordan, and that therefore — this is the move — it was not as though there was a Palestinian people whom the Zionists had come and dispossessed. They did not exist. Her defenders have argued, reasonably, that she was denying the existence of a distinct Palestinian nation, not denying that individual Arabs lived there. That is true, and it does not help. The function of the argument is to render the country empty of a people with a claim — to convert a land with inhabitants into a land without a nation, so that what was done in 1948 could not have been the dispossession of a people, because there was no people there to dispossess. It is the old formula — a land without a people for a people without a land — restated by a head of government twenty-one years after the dispossession it was written to excuse. This was not a fringe view. It was the prime minister.¹⁷
Now the Palestinian denial, and here the precision is everything. The Palestine Liberation Organisation’s founding charter, in its 1968 form, called for armed struggle as the only road to the liberation of Palestine and for the dismantling of the Zionist state. This is routinely described as the answering image of Meir — the Palestinian denial of Israel set against the Israeli denial of Palestine. But it is not the same act, because refusing to recognise a state is not the same as denying that a people exists. No state has a right to exist. People have rights; states have legitimacy, which is earned, conditional, and revocable, and which the people living under a state’s power are entitled to withhold. A dispossessed population refusing to declare the state built on its dispossession legitimate is not committing the sin Meir committed. It is exercising a judgement that belongs to it. The 1968 charter’s refusal of Israel was a refusal of a state and a project. It was not a denial that Jews existed or a claim that Jewish people were not a people. Whatever else is wrong with the document — and there is plenty — it did not do to the Jews what Meir did to the Palestinians.
The charter’s fate is also part of the record, including the part that does not flatter the Palestinian side. After the Oslo process began, Yasser Arafat committed in writing in 1993 that the clauses denying Israel’s right to exist were no longer valid, and in April 1996 the Palestine National Council voted, 504 to 54, to amend the charter accordingly. Whether that amendment was ever constitutionally completed is genuinely disputed: Israel argues the vote fell short of the charter’s own two-thirds requirement and that the promised redrafted document was never produced, and on the bare procedural facts Israel has a point. The Palestinians point to the 1996 vote and to a further show of hands in Gaza in 1998, in the presence of President Clinton, as having settled the matter. What is beyond dispute is the gap between paper and practice that has run in both directions ever since — commitments made in English to international audiences, hedged in Arabic for domestic ones, on the Palestinian side; and on the Israeli side, recognition of the PLO as a negotiating partner running alongside the relentless construction of the settlements that made the state the PLO was recognising harder to build every year.¹⁸
Then there is Hamas, and the 1988 charter, and here the article has to do something more careful than either its defenders or its prosecutors usually manage. The 1988 charter contains real antisemitism. It is important to say that plainly, and important to say exactly where it lives. In Article 32, the charter states that the Zionist plan is laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In Article 22, it credits Jews with engineering the French and Russian revolutions, controlling global finance and the press, and standing behind both World Wars. This is not anti-Zionism and it is not a refusal of a state. It is the European antisemitic tradition — the forgery manufactured by the Tsarist secret police, the conspiracy literature that fed the Nazis — translated into Arabic and grafted onto an Islamic document. It is imported. It does not arise from the tradition Hamas claims to speak for; it arises from the tradition that murdered Europe’s Jews, picked up and put to use by people who should have recognised it as the enemy’s weapon. Naming it is not a concession to Israel. It is the one standard doing its work: a thing is what it is regardless of who wrote it, and what is in Articles 22 and 32 is antisemitism.¹⁹
But the passage of the 1988 charter most often waved as proof of genocidal intent is not in Articles 22 or 32. It is in Article 7, and it is not the imported European material. It is a hadith — a saying attributed to the Prophet, found in the two most authoritative Sunni collections, those of al-Bukhari and Muslim. And it does not say what the analysts who quote it think it says.
Read properly, the hadith is a sign of the end times. It foretells a future event — an age of great injustice in which the Jews suffer a terrible wrong. It belongs to the same body of prophecy as the return of Jesus and the other signs of the Hour: the catalogue of what Muslims believe is foretold to occur at the close of history. It is a description of a coming catastrophe, given in the grammar of prophecy. It is not a command, and the catastrophe it describes is one that befalls the Jews — not one that Muslims are instructed to go and cause.
I am a Muslim, and I will say what those analysts do not know to say: they have not merely misread the genre, they have inverted the meaning. A prophecy of a calamity foretold for the end of days is not an instruction for the present. Christian eschatology holds that when Christ returns the Jews will accept him or be killed for refusing — and no one reads that as a command to Christians to go and do it now. The hadith is the same kind of text. No Muslim scholar reads the signs of the Hour as a to-do list. To take a prophecy of a future affliction and present it as a present-day Muslim plan to kill Jews is to turn the text inside out — which is what happens when people reach into the eschatology of a tradition they have not studied and pull out the thing their fears were already looking for. Hamas’s error in 1988 was to reach for the text at all — to dress a national-political movement in the language of the end of the world, and so hand its enemies exactly the weapon they have used. That was a serious misjudgement. It was not the thing the analysts say it was. The antisemitism in the 1988 charter is real, and it is in the European material; the hadith is something else, and precision requires saying so.²⁰
By 2017 Hamas had produced a different document. Its Document of General Principles and Policies accepted a Palestinian state on the 1967 lines as a formula of national consensus, stated that its struggle was with the Zionist project and not with Jews as Jews, and grounded resistance to occupation in international law. It dropped the imported European antisemitism of 1988 entirely — no Protocols, no conspiracy literature. It did not recognise the State of Israel, and it retained the aim of a liberated Palestine from the river to the sea. Those last two facts are routinely presented as proof that nothing changed. They are not. Refusing to recognise a state is not antisemitism, by the standard established above, and the demand for a free Palestine between the river and the sea is a maximalist territorial claim — no more and no less than the maximalist territorial claim that sits, to this day, in the founding platform of the party that has governed Israel for most of the last three decades. The 1977 Likud platform states that between the sea and the Jordan there will be only Israeli sovereignty. It has never been rescinded. When a Palestinian says “from the river to the sea,” it is treated as a call for genocide and grounds for expulsion from a university. When Likud writes the identical claim into its charter, it is called the platform of a governing party and underwritten by the United States. The phrase cannot be a genocidal slogan in one mouth and a policy position in the other. It is the same claim. The asymmetry is not in the words. It is in who is permitted to say them.²¹
Which brings the denial back to the present, and to the Israeli side, where state power makes it consequential. The governing coalition assembled at the end of 2022 wrote into its coalition agreement that the Jewish people have an exclusive right to all of the land between the river and the sea. Its senior figures have said the rest out loud: the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has pursued the entrenchment and annexation of the West Bank and the burial of Palestinian statehood as an explicit programme; the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, heir to a movement once banned for incitement to racism, has built a career on it. And this is not confined to the far right. Naftali Bennett, the figure most likely to replace Netanyahu and a man positioned as the moderate alternative, has stated for the record that he is against a Palestinian state and against conceding an inch of land. The rejection of Palestinian self-determination is not a position of the Israeli fringe. It is, across the governing coalition and the opposition that hopes to replace it, something close to a consensus. That is the denial that matters now — not a slogan in a charter that its authors revised, but the settled policy of the state that holds the power to act on it.²²
Both peoples, then, have refused the other. But the refusals are not equivalent, and the article will not pretend they are for the sake of a tidy symmetry. One side produced a prime minister who said the other was not a people, and a governing class that now denies it a state. The other produced a charter that refused to recognise a state — which is its right — and, in 1988, disgraced itself by importing Europe’s antisemitism, which it had the sense to drop in 2017. Name all of it. Then notice that only one side has spent the entire period holding the power to turn its denial into fact on the ground, acre by acre, and has done so.²³
The Occupation as System
Return to the annexation of East Jerusalem in 1980, because it was the proof of concept. When Israel took the Basic Law and declared the eastern half of the city its eternal capital, it was not holding occupied land pending a negotiated settlement. It was absorbing it — converting territory taken by force into territory claimed as sovereign, in defiance of a Security Council that declared the act null and void. That is the logic that has governed the occupied territories ever since, and it is why the word occupation, with its implication of something temporary, no longer describes what is there. What is there is a system, built deliberately over more than half a century, designed not to end but to last. This section describes the system.
Begin with the settlements, because they are the engine. In 1967 there were no Israeli civilians living in the West Bank. Today there are around 750,000 settlers — roughly 500,000 in the West Bank and another 250,000 in East Jerusalem — living in communities built on occupied land, in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its own civilian population into the territory it occupies. The number has grown under every Israeli government since 1967, Labour and Likud without exception; this is not the project of one faction but of the state. Under the current government the expansion has reached its highest rate since 2017: dozens of new settlements and outposts authorised, illegal outposts retroactively legalised, and in 2025 a designation of large areas of the West Bank as “state property” that observers across the spectrum described as de facto annexation. The settlements are not accidents of policy. They are the policy. Each one makes the territory a Palestinian state would occupy smaller, more fragmented, and less viable — which is, by the explicit statement of the ministers who build them, the point.²⁴
The settlements require a second structure to sustain them, and that structure is the part of the system that has a name in international law. In the same territory, on the same land, two populations live under two entirely different legal regimes, assigned not by where a person is but by what a person is. A Jewish settler in the West Bank lives under Israeli civil law, with the rights of an Israeli citizen — courts, due process, the vote. A Palestinian living yards away, under the same military authority, lives under Israeli military law: tried in military courts with conviction rates above 99 per cent, subject to military orders, without the vote and without the rights the settler beside him takes for granted. This is not an incidental inequality. It is a designed one. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel — an Israeli organisation — has called it, plainly, “one rule, two legal systems.” Two people, the same ground, different law according to nationality. There is a word for the systematic domination of one group over another, on the basis of group identity, enforced by separate law. We will come to the word.²⁵
The daily texture of that system, for the Palestinian half of it, is a life organised around permission. To move through the West Bank is to move through checkpoints. To build a home, dig a well, add a room, or connect to the electricity grid in the 60 per cent of the West Bank that Israel fully controls is to need a permit that is almost never granted, and to build without it is to invite the demolition of what you built. To cross from the West Bank into Jerusalem or Israel for work, medical care, or prayer is to need a permit that can be revoked without reason or explanation. Cutting through it all is the separation barrier — 712 kilometres of wall and fence, more than twice the length of the 1967 line, much of it built not along that line but inside the West Bank, carving off land and water and folding the larger settlements onto the Israeli side. The International Court of Justice ruled the barrier’s route through occupied territory unlawful in 2004. It was built anyway, and it stands.²⁶
And running beneath the permits and the checkpoints is detention. At any given time Israel holds several thousand Palestinians — around 3,350 at the most recent count — in administrative detention: imprisonment without charge, without trial, and without being told the evidence, on the basis of secret material the detainee and his lawyer are not permitted to see, renewable indefinitely in six-month increments. A person can spend years in prison this way without ever being charged with a crime or shown why he is there. It is a power the system uses at scale, and it falls, by design, on one population and not the other.²⁷
In July 2024 the International Court of Justice looked at the whole of this and reached the conclusion the structure had been building towards for decades. In its advisory opinion, the Court held that Israel’s continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory is unlawful and must end as rapidly as possible; that all settlement activity must cease and the settlers be evacuated; that Israel must make reparations; that the territory is a single unit whose integrity must be preserved; and that the Oslo Accords provide no exception to any of it. The Court grounded the illegality not on this or that abuse but on the two foundational wrongs the whole system serves: the acquisition of territory by force, and the denial of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination. And on the question of the two legal systems, the Court found that Israel’s laws breach the article of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination that prohibits racial segregation and apartheid. That is the word, and it did not come first from Israel’s enemies.²⁸
It came, in large part, from inside Israel. In January 2021 B’Tselem, the most prominent human rights organisation in Israel, published a paper concluding that a single regime of Jewish supremacy operates over all the land between the river and the sea, and that the name for that regime is apartheid. The Israeli group Yesh Din had reached the same legal conclusion about the West Bank the year before. Human Rights Watch followed in April 2021, Amnesty International in February 2022, each with several hundred pages of analysis. When Amnesty’s report was attacked, thirteen Israeli human rights organisations — B’Tselem, Yesh Din, Breaking the Silence, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, and others — issued a joint statement defending it and affirming that the apartheid designation was not only legitimate but necessary. This is the same pattern that ran through the history of 1948: the most damning account of what the Israeli state is doing has been produced, repeatedly, by Israelis. It is not antisemitism to repeat a conclusion that Israel’s own human rights community reached first. It is, again, the one standard — the system is what it is, and the people best placed to see it have named it.²⁹
The settlers do not only build. Since 7 October 2023 the West Bank has seen the worst settler violence in its history — more than 1,800 documented attacks in 2025 alone, the highest annual total OCHA has ever recorded, with a record number of Palestinians — more than thirty-seven thousand in 2025 — driven from their homes by settler violence and military operations together, and a near-total impunity in which the overwhelming majority of complaints close without a single charge. Part I of this series documented that violence in detail, and there is no need to repeat it here. What matters for this section is only that the violence is not a breakdown of the system. It is the system working as designed — the slow clearing of land, household by household, under the protection of an army that stands by, to make room for the next outpost. The annexation that began with a law about Jerusalem in 1980 is being completed, in the West Bank, with caravans and arson and the patient rewriting of who is permitted to live where.³⁰
Gaza Before 7 October
Gaza appears, at first glance, to break the pattern of the previous section. The West Bank was absorbed; Gaza, in 2005, was the place Israel left. In the summer of that year Ariel Sharon withdrew the army and uprooted some eight thousand Israeli settlers from twenty-one settlements in the Gaza Strip — dragging the resisters out of their synagogues on live television — and declared an end to Israeli control and responsibility there. It was presented to the world as a painful concession for peace, the precedent that proved Israel would trade land for quiet. It was not that. To understand why, you have to listen to the man who planned it.
Dov Weisglass was Sharon’s closest adviser and the architect of the disengagement. In an interview with Haaretz in 2004, he explained what it was actually for. The withdrawal, he said, was “formaldehyde” — a preservative. Its purpose was to freeze the political process, to place the question of a Palestinian state in suspension so that it could not advance, and to do so with enough of a gesture that the world’s pressure on Israel would lift. Leaving Gaza was not a step towards Palestinian statehood. It was a way of taking statehood off the table while appearing to do the opposite. The architect said so himself, in a mainstream Israeli newspaper, before it happened.³¹
And Israel did not, in the sense that matters in law, leave. It withdrew its settlers and its soldiers from the interior and redeployed them around the perimeter, and from that perimeter it kept control of everything that made Gaza a place people could live or leave: the airspace, the coastline and its waters, the population registry, the electricity, the flow of goods, and every land crossing but the one with Egypt. A territory whose air, sea, and land access are controlled by a foreign army is, under the law of occupation, still occupied, whether or not that army sleeps inside it — and the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and in July 2024 the International Court of Justice have all said so. The disengagement did not end the occupation of Gaza. It changed its form, from direct rule to control at one remove — from a hand inside the territory to a hand around its throat.³²
That hand closed in 2007. After Hamas won the Palestinian elections of 2006 and then, in 2007, took sole control of Gaza in its split with Fatah, Israel — with Egyptian cooperation — imposed a blockade by land, sea, and air. The stated aim was to pressure Hamas. The effect, and the design, fell on two million people. Imports were cut to what Israel called a humanitarian minimum; exports were halted almost entirely, as a matter of deliberate policy that Israeli security officials described in their own words as economic warfare and as a means of separating Gaza from the West Bank. Before the blockade, more than four hundred truckloads of goods entered Gaza on an average day. Under it, the number fell to a fraction of that. A territory that had been poor became a territory that was sealed.³³
How deliberate the calculation was became a matter of public record in 2012, when, after a three-and-a-half-year legal battle waged by the Israeli human rights group Gisha, the Israeli defence ministry was forced by the courts to release a document it had produced in 2008. Its title was “Food Consumption in the Gaza Strip — Red Lines.” The document was what it sounds like. Israeli officials, working with the health ministry, had calculated the minimum number of calories the population of Gaza required to avoid malnutrition — an average of 2,279 per person per day — and worked backwards from that figure to the quantity of food, and the number of trucks, that would be permitted to enter. The calculation arrived at 106 trucks a day as the humanitarian minimum. In practice Israel let in an average of around 67. The defence ministry, on releasing the document, insisted it was a draft that had never guided policy. The quotas in force at the time matched its figures. A state does not calculate the minimum calories of two million people it has sealed off, and then hold the food below even that line, unless the suffering is the point. The deprivation was not a side effect of the blockade. It was the policy of collective punishment.³⁴
The blockade was punctuated, every few years, by war. Between the disengagement and 7 October 2023 there were four major Israeli military operations in Gaza: Cast Lead in the winter of 2008–09, Pillar of Defence in 2012, Protective Edge in the summer of 2014, and Guardian of the Walls in 2021. Across them, roughly four thousand Palestinians were killed, the large majority of them civilians, against roughly a hundred Israelis — the 2014 war alone killing more than two thousand people in Gaza, among them hundreds of children. These were not symmetrical exchanges, and the disparity was not an accident of fortune; it was the disparity between one of the most advanced militaries on earth, operating over a sealed and densely crowded strip of land, and the rockets and fighters of the territory beneath it. The casualty counts, it should be said, are not a matter of Palestinian propaganda: an analysis by Haaretz found that the Gaza health ministry’s figures across these wars tracked closely with Israel’s own tallies, diverging by single-digit percentages in either direction.³⁵
The Israeli strategic literature gave this recurring war a name, and the name is worth knowing because it was not coined by Israel’s enemies. In a 2014 paper for the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, two Israeli scholars, Efraim Inbar and Eitan Shamir, described the doctrine governing these operations as “mowing the grass.” The metaphor is exact and deliberate. Israel, on this account, cannot uproot Hamas and does not expect a political solution, so it settles for a strategy of attrition: periodic large-scale operations that degrade the enemy’s capacity and buy a few years of quiet, after which the grass grows back and is mown again. Civilians die in the mowing — that is understood and accepted in the model. This is not a critic’s caricature of Israeli strategy. It is Israeli strategists, in a strategic-studies journal, describing the management of two million people as a recurring act of grounds-keeping.³⁶
And underneath the wars, year on year, was the slow grinding of ordinary life under the blockade. By the eve of 7 October 2023, after sixteen years of closure, the figures described a place engineered into collapse. Around 97 per cent of the water from Gaza’s only aquifer was unfit for human consumption — over-pumped, salted by the intruding sea, fouled by sewage that could not be treated for want of power. Roughly two-thirds of the population lived in poverty. Some 45 per cent of the workforce, and far more of the young, had no work — among the highest unemployment rates on earth. The majority of the population depended on humanitarian aid to eat. Electricity came in intermittent blocks of a few hours. The medical system, starved of equipment that Israel restricted as “dual-use,” was held together by improvisation. This was not the aftermath of a natural disaster. It was the steady-state condition of a territory that a neighbouring state controlled from the outside and had decided, in the words of its own officials, to keep on a diet. This was Gaza before the seventh of October — not a peaceful place that erupted without warning, but a sealed and immiserated one that the world had agreed not to look at. What happened on that day, and everything Israel and Hamas each did, was the subject of Part I. Why it was always going to come from somewhere is the subject of this one.³⁷
The Peace Process That Was Not One
Here is the story almost everyone has heard. Three times, Israel offered the Palestinians a state, and three times the Palestinians refused it. Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat the moon at Camp David in 2000, and Arafat walked away and launched an intifada. Bill Clinton put parameters on the table, and Arafat said no to those too. Ehud Olmert offered Mahmoud Abbas an even better deal in 2008 — almost the whole West Bank — and Abbas never even answered. The lesson drawn from this is the load-bearing claim of an entire politics: there is no Palestinian partner for peace. The Palestinians do not want a state beside Israel; they want Israel gone. They have been offered statehood and have rejected it every time, because rejection is what they are.
Some of the facts in that story are true, and the one standard requires saying so before taking the story apart. The Palestinian side did make few formal written counterproposals across these negotiations. Arafat did reject the Clinton Parameters of December 2000. Abbas did let the channel with Olmert lapse in 2008 without signing. A Palestinian leadership that had been more agile, more willing to put its own maps on the table, more able to say a clear yes to the best of what was offered, might have changed the history. The Palestinian leadership over this period was often weak, often divided, and sometimes simply not good at the thing it was trying to do. None of that is in dispute, and an honest account does not hide it.
But the story collapses the moment you look at what was actually offered, and at what was happening on the ground while the offering went on.
Start with Oslo, where the process began in 1993, because Oslo set the trap that everything after it sprang. The Oslo Accords were not a peace agreement and did not promise a Palestinian state — the phrase “Palestinian state” appears nowhere in them. They were an interim arrangement: mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO, a Palestinian Authority to administer the population, the division of the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C, and a five-year timetable at the end of which the hard questions — borders, Jerusalem, refugees, settlements — were to be resolved in permanent-status talks. The deferral was the problem. By postponing every fundamental question and freezing the Palestinians into administering fragments of territory in the meantime, Oslo gave Israel a five-year window in which the facts on the ground could be changed before the questions about them were ever answered. And they were changed. During the Oslo years, between 1993 and 2000, the Israeli settler population in the West Bank nearly doubled — from roughly 110,000 to over 190,000 — even though the accords explicitly forbade either side from taking steps that would alter the status of the territory pending the final talks. The peace process and the settlement project ran at the same time, in the same place, in opposite directions. One Israeli prime minister of the period, Yitzhak Shamir, said afterwards what the strategy had been: he would have dragged out the autonomy talks for ten years while settling half a million Jews in the territories. Another, Benjamin Netanyahu, was caught on video in 2001 telling a group of settlers that he had de facto put an end to the Oslo Accords. These are not the words of men negotiating in good faith. They are the words of men running out the clock.³⁸
There is a darker fact beneath the clock-running, and it belongs here because it is the first appearance of a man this series will keep returning to. In 1993 Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister, shook Arafat’s hand on the White House lawn and staked his career on the process. Two years later he was dead — shot in the back at a peace rally in Tel Aviv by Yigal Amir, an Israeli ultranationalist who believed that handing “Jewish” land to the Palestinians was a sin he was religiously obliged to prevent. Rabin was not killed by a Palestinian. He was killed by an Israeli, to stop an Israeli prime minister from making peace. And the killer did not come from nowhere. In the months before the murder, Rabin had been denounced at mass rallies as a traitor and a Nazi, his image circulated in SS uniform and in a coffin, and presiding over one of those crowds in Jerusalem’s Zion Square, on a balcony above chants of “Death to Rabin,” stood the leader of the opposition: Benjamin Netanyahu. The head of Israel’s internal security service asked Netanyahu to cool the rhetoric. He declined. Whether that incitement made him complicit in the murder is a charge made by his own countrymen and denied by him, and this article will not settle it. What is not in dispute is the sequence, and the sequence is worth holding onto, because it is the first instance of a pattern. The one Israeli leader who staked everything on peace was killed for it; the political climate that produced his killer was one Netanyahu helped build and refused to cool; and within six months Netanyahu had ridden the aftermath into the prime minister’s office. Keep his name in mind. From here on he will be standing near every door that closes — the collapse of the process, and then a policy toward Hamas that will take the next section to explain. And when the catastrophe finally came, on the morning of 7 October, the same man was prime minister, presiding over the worst security failure in the country’s history — a failure this series will examine, in its place, far more closely than the official account has invited anyone to. The peace process did not only die of Israeli bad faith. At its most decisive moment, it was shot, and the man who gained the most from the shooting is the man still in power when this story ends.³⁹
Now Camp David, the summit at the centre of the myth. The claim that Barak offered the Palestinians 96 per cent of the West Bank has been repeated so many times it has become furniture. It is misleading. Barak offered 96 per cent of Israel’s definition of the West Bank — a definition that had already subtracted East Jerusalem, large parts of the Jordan Valley, and the major settlement blocs from the total. What was actually on the table was the Israeli annexation of around 9 per cent of the West Bank, including the Ariel settlement bloc, which thrusts like a finger deep into the territory’s centre, with little or no land given in exchange. The settlement blocs Israel would keep would have broken the Palestinian state into sections, its parts connected — if at all — through Israeli-controlled corridors. Israel would have retained control of the Jordan Valley for years, of the new state’s airspace indefinitely, and of much of the West Bank’s water. On Jerusalem, the Palestinians were offered limited sovereignty over some neighbourhoods and not others, with the status of the Haram al-Sharif — the third holiest site in Islam — left contested. On the refugees, there was no meaningful right of return. This was the offer described to the world as so generous that refusing it proved bad faith. The most effective rebuttal to that description comes not from any Palestinian but from the Israeli foreign minister who helped draft it. Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israel’s chief negotiator at Camp David, said a few years later: “if I were a Palestinian I would have rejected Camp David, as well.” When the man who made the offer says he would have turned it down, the myth of the spurned generous offer is finished.⁴⁰
There is a case on the other side, and it goes in here. Benny Morris interviewed Barak at length, and Barak’s account — that he offered more than any Israeli leader before him and that Arafat met it with an unyielding no and then with violence — is on the record and is held sincerely by serious people. The Palestinians’ failure to table their own detailed maps at Camp David was real and was a genuine failure of statecraft. The point is not that the Palestinian side negotiated well. It often negotiated badly. The point is narrower and harder: a bad offer does not become a good one because the people refusing it are flawed, and “they said no” is not the same sentence as “they were offered something a reasonable people would have accepted.”⁴¹
And then the part of the story the myth simply deletes: what happened after Camp David, when the two sides came closest of all. At Taba, in January 2001, negotiating on the basis of the Clinton Parameters, Israeli and Palestinian teams came nearer to an agreement than they ever had before or have since — close enough that the negotiators themselves said so in a joint statement. The talks did not collapse because the Palestinians walked away. They ran out of time. Barak had already resigned and was a caretaker prime minister facing an election; Clinton had just left office; and before the gap could be bridged, Ariel Sharon won the Israeli election of February 2001 and refused to resume the talks at all. The closest the two peoples ever came to peace was ended not by a Palestinian no but by an Israeli election. There is an Israeli counter-argument that no deal was truly in reach at Taba — that the Palestinian concessions were tactical and that Arafat would never have signed — and it deserves to be on the table. But it cannot be true both that the Palestinians rejected every offer and that the offer at Taba was never really there to reject.⁴²
The Olmert offer of 2008 closes the pattern. Ehud Olmert, near the end of his premiership, offered Abbas roughly 93.7 per cent of the West Bank with a land swap and a corridor linking Gaza to the West Bank — the most far-reaching territorial offer an Israeli leader has ever made, and a serious one. Abbas did not sign it. The myth stops there: offered a state, said no again. What the myth omits is the condition of the man making the offer. By September 2008 Olmert had announced his resignation, was under multiple criminal investigations that would later send him to prison, and was a caretaker whose own foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, was telling the Americans privately not to bother with him because she would be the next prime minister. The Palestinians were being asked to sign a final, historic, irreversible agreement on their national existence with a man who would be out of office within months and could not deliver his own cabinet, let alone his country. They also could not get a straight answer on the maps — Olmert would not let Abbas keep the map to study it, and the percentages were contested, because Israel’s and the Palestinians’ definitions of the West Bank differ by enough that Olmert’s 6.3 per cent annexation could work out closer to 8.5. A signature from Abbas would have bound the Palestinians forever to a deal the man across the table could not keep for a week. That is not a rejection of statehood. It is a refusal to be the only side bound by it.⁴³
So weigh the whole thing by the one standard. The Palestinian leadership was weak, divided, and frequently inept, and it missed chances that a better leadership might have taken. That is true, and it is the smaller truth. The larger truth is that the deals on offer never met the minimum that international law already guaranteed — a contiguous, sovereign state on the territory occupied in 1967, with a capital in East Jerusalem — and that the two moments when peace was closest were killed not by Palestinian rejection but by Israeli political collapse: an election in 2001, a disgraced and departing prime minister in 2008. And underneath all of it, through every summit and every handshake on every White House lawn, the settlements grew, year on year, decade on decade, making the state being negotiated smaller and less possible with every house built. A process in which one party is permitted to consume the very thing the negotiations are supposedly about — the land — while the negotiations drag on, is not a peace process. It was a sham by design.⁴⁴
Netanyahu’s Hamas Policy
In March 2019, at a meeting of his Likud party’s members of the Knesset, Benjamin Netanyahu explained his strategy. Anyone who wanted to prevent a Palestinian state, he told them, had to support “bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas.” This was, he said, part of a deliberate plan — to keep the Palestinians of Gaza separated from the Palestinians of the West Bank, so that the two could never combine into a single people with a single claim to a single state.⁴⁵
Read that again, because it is the hinge of everything. The prime minister of Israel told his own party that propping up Hamas — the organisation his government designates a terrorist enemy, the organisation that would carry out the massacre of 7 October — was Israeli policy, and he told them why: a strong Hamas in Gaza and a weak Authority in the West Bank meant a divided Palestinian people, and a divided Palestinian people could be denied a state forever. The enemy was useful precisely because it was the enemy. A Palestinian partner for peace was the thing to be avoided; Hamas, which would never be a partner, was therefore the thing to be preserved.
The quote has been disputed by Netanyahu as a misquote. But when an American magazine read the words back to him in an interview years later, he did not deny saying them — he defended the policy they described. And in any case, the 2019 statement is not an outlier that has to carry the argument alone. It is the most explicit expression of a position that an entire chorus of senior Israelis, across the political spectrum, has stated in their own words.⁴⁶
Consider the chorus. Bezalel Smotrich, now Israel’s finance minister, said in 2015 that the Palestinian Authority was a “burden” and Hamas an “asset.” Gershon Hacohen, a former Israeli general and an associate of Netanyahu, said in 2019 that the prime minister’s strategy was to prevent a two-state solution by turning Hamas into his closest partner: openly an enemy, he said, but covertly an ally. Ehud Barak, the former prime minister, said the same year that Netanyahu’s strategy was to keep Hamas “alive and kicking” in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority. And Ehud Olmert, another former prime minister, put it most plainly of all in 2023: over the previous fifteen years, he said, Israel did everything to downgrade the Palestinian Authority and to boost Hamas — and when Gaza was on the brink of collapse, it was Netanyahu who saved it. These are not the voices of Israel’s critics. They are former prime ministers, serving ministers, and retired generals, describing — some in approval, some in horror — a single, coherent, deliberate policy.⁴⁷
And the policy was not only spoken. It was funded. From 2018, with Netanyahu’s government approving the arrangement in a security cabinet meeting in August of that year, Qatar began sending cash into Gaza — suitcases carrying fifteen million dollars at a time, sometimes more, passing every month through Israeli-controlled crossings with Israeli permission, from the summer of 2018 until the very eve of 7 October 2023. The money was real, and so was one of its stated purposes: it paid the salaries of civil servants and kept a population on the edge of catastrophe from going over it. That part is true, and Netanyahu’s defenders are right to say it — the cash had a humanitarian function, and some who watched it argued the alternative to the suitcases was an explosion. But the humanitarian cover does not erase the strategic intent, because the strategic intent was stated out loud by the man running the policy. You do not have to choose between “the money fed hungry people” and “the money kept Hamas in power to prevent a Palestinian state.” Both were true, and the second was the reason the first was permitted.⁴⁸
How committed was Netanyahu to keeping the money flowing? Committed enough that when the payments were in doubt, he sent the head of the Mossad to ask Qatar to continue them. In February 2020, on Netanyahu’s orders, the Mossad chief Yossi Cohen and a senior general travelled to Qatar to plead for the cash transfers to Hamas to keep going. The Mossad chief went again in September 2023. And according to an Israeli report, a month before the 7 October attack, Israel asked Qatar to increase the funds. The prime minister of Israel used his foreign intelligence service to lobby a foreign government to keep money flowing to the organisation that was, at that moment, finalising the attack of 7 October.⁴⁹
Netanyahu denies all of it. He calls the charge that he funded and strengthened Hamas ridiculous; he says the Qatari money was humanitarian and that Hamas built its arsenal not from the suitcases but from weapons smuggled through Sinai; his office says he was never shown an intelligence document warning that the money was being diverted to terror. Each of these defences can be argued. But they sit against the weight of his own security establishment, which warned for years that the cash was strengthening Hamas militarily; against the testimony of his own former intelligence chiefs and generals; against his own recorded words to his own party; and against the simple, damning fact that when the policy was threatened, he fought to save it. A man does not send his spy chief abroad to beg for the survival of a programme he was merely tolerating for humanitarian reasons.⁵⁰
So return to the thread this series is following. In 1995 Netanyahu stood on the balcony above the crowd that called for Rabin’s death, and rode the aftermath of the murder into office. Across the decades that followed, he ran out the clock on every negotiation while the settlements grew. And underneath it all, he kept Hamas alive on purpose — funded, tolerated, preserved — because a living Hamas was the surest guarantee that no Palestinian state would ever be born. The policy worked, in its own terms, for years. The Palestinians stayed divided. The state stayed impossible. And then, on the morning of 7 October 2023, the enemy that Israeli policy had spent fifteen years keeping alive and kicking came through the fence. What that policy has to answer for, and whether the failures of that morning were only failures, is the work of Part III. For now it is enough to have established the thing the official story is least eager to say: the man who led Israel on 7 October had spent his career making sure the organisation that attacked it survived.
The Case Hamas Has Made
We come now to the two cases — the case for the Palestinian cause and the case for the Israeli one — and they are placed here, side by side, deliberately. Neither can be lifted out and read alone. Anyone who quotes the section that follows without the section after it, or the section after it without this one, is misrepresenting the argument, and they will have to delete half the article to do it. That is the point. The law that judges one judges the other, and it is going to be applied to both in the same breath.
Begin with what Hamas itself has said about why it did what it did on 7 October — not because Hamas is owed a hearing, but because an account that refuses to state its enemy’s stated reasons is propaganda, and because the reasons, stripped of the horror they were used to justify, are not difficult to find on the record. In its own statements and in the document it published afterward, Hamas gave its account: that after seventy-five years of dispossession, sixteen years of a sealed and strangled Gaza, the expansion of the settlements, the violence at al-Aqsa, the daily humiliations of the West Bank, the thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, and the collapse of every avenue that was supposed to lead to a state, there was nothing left that the world had been willing to recognise as a route to freedom. The military aim, as Hamas stated it, was to attack the army’s Gaza Division and to capture Israeli soldiers in order to force an exchange for the Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. There was also a strategic motive its leaders have since described: to detonate the normalisation then under way between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which threatened to settle the region’s future over the heads of the Palestinians as though they did not exist.⁵¹
The hostage logic, in particular, was not improvised, and it was not irrational by the cold standards of the people who built it. It rested on a precedent Israel itself had set. In 2011, to recover a single captured Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, Israel released one thousand and twenty-seven Palestinian prisoners, two hundred and eighty of them serving life sentences. One soldier for a thousand prisoners: that was the exchange rate Israel had established. The men who planned 7 October had watched it happen. The taking of captives to trade for the imprisoned was, to them, the one tactic that had ever actually emptied the cells.⁵²
And underneath the tactics is a claim of right that international law does not simply dismiss. A people under occupation has the right to resist it. The right of peoples to self-determination is inalienable, affirmed in the United Nations Charter, in the human rights covenants, and by the International Court of Justice; and the United Nations has repeatedly recognised the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples under colonial and alien domination for their freedom. A Palestinian who picks up arms against the army occupying his land is not, by that act alone, a criminal under international law. The occupation is unlawful; resistance to an unlawful occupation is not in itself unlawful. This is the part of the case that the people who only ever say “terrorism” cannot afford to hear, and it is true.
But here the one standard arrives, and it arrives for Hamas exactly as it will arrive, in the section that follows, for Israel. The right to resist an occupation is not a right to do anything whatever in the name of resistance. International humanitarian law draws one line that admits no exception and bends for no cause, however just: you may not target civilians. The principle of distinction — between combatants, who may be fought, and civilians, who may not be attacked — is absolute. It is not suspended by the justice of a grievance. It is not suspended by seventy-five years of dispossession. It is not suspended by anything. A cause can be entirely legitimate and the method used to advance it can be a war crime, and when that happens the legitimacy of the cause does not wash the crime clean. It cannot, because the moment it could, the protection of civilians would mean nothing — every army that ever slaughtered civilians has believed its cause was just.
And on 7 October, Hamas crossed that line, knowingly and on a mass scale. Whatever the plan was on paper, what happened on the ground was the deliberate murder of civilians: the families killed in their homes in the kibbutzim, the hundreds of young people hunted and gunned down at a music festival, the taking of civilian hostages — children, the elderly — who are protected persons under the law and whose seizure is itself a war crime. Hamas has claimed, in its official account, that it did not target civilians, that the orders were to fight only soldiers, that the killing of civilians was the work of chaos and of others who poured through the breach. That claim is false, and Part I of this series set out the evidence that makes it false. The massacre at the festival was not a military operation that went wrong; it was the hunting of unarmed civilians for hours. Senior Hamas figures afterward called the day a triumph to be repeated again and again, and dismissed the killing at the festival as a thing of no account. A movement that murders civilians and then lies about having done it does not get to hide behind the justice of its cause, and this article will not let it.⁵³
So the verdict on the Palestinian case, stated plainly and without hedging in either direction. The cause is real. The grievance is real. The right to resist the occupation is recognised in the same international law that this series has invoked against Israel throughout, and it does not evaporate because the resistance is led by people one finds repugnant. And the method chosen on 7 October — the deliberate killing of civilians, the taking of civilian hostages — was a war crime, full stop, unredeemed by the justice of the cause it was meant to serve. Both of these are true. Neither cancels the other. Anyone who needs one of them to be false in order to hold the other has not understood the law, which holds both at once, and holds them for everyone.
The Case Israel Has Made
Now Israel’s case, judged by the same law. It opens with a fact that nothing in this series diminishes: on the morning of 7 October, more than a thousand people inside Israel were murdered, families were slaughtered in their homes, young people were hunted at a festival, and some two hundred and fifty people, many of them civilians, were dragged into Gaza as hostages. That was an atrocity and a crime, and the previous section already named it as one. It is the foundation of Israel’s case for nearly everything it has done since — in Gaza, and in the West Bank where no one attacked it on that day.
Stated in its own terms, the case runs as follows. No state on earth would absorb a massacre of its civilians and do nothing; every state has the inherent right to defend its people against armed attack, a right written into the United Nations Charter itself. Israel did not start this; it was attacked, without warning, by an organisation sworn to its destruction and armed by Iran, and a country that has buried its dead and still has hostages in enemy tunnels is a country at war whether it chose to be or not. The democracies that lecture Israel, the case continues, firebombed cities from the air in their own great war and invaded countries on the far side of the world after a single day’s attack on their soil; the demand that Israel alone fight a war of perfect cleanliness against an enemy that hides beneath its own population is a demand made of no one else. And that enemy does hide beneath its population — in tunnels dug under hospitals and schools, among civilians it is content to see killed because every dead child in Gaza is a weapon in the war for the world’s sympathy. The civilian deaths, on this account, are Hamas’s doing, not Israel’s: Hamas chose to fight from within a crowd. These are the load-bearing claims of Israel’s case, and they are made with real conviction by people who watched their neighbours die.⁵⁴
And as with the Palestinian case, part of this is true, and the one standard requires saying so plainly before anything is tested. A state does have an inherent right of self-defence. The attack of 7 October was, by any measure, the kind of armed attack that triggers it. The hostages are a continuing crime, every day they are held, and the law is unambiguously on the side of their immediate and unconditional release. And it is true that where a party deliberately uses civilians to shield military targets, the law condemns it, and Hamas has at times done exactly that. But two things have to be said in the same breath, or the point becomes propaganda. Gaza is among the most crowded places on earth, a sealed strip with no barracks, no bases, no open ground a fighter could retreat to that Israel did not control or could not bomb; the law asks a defender to separate its forces from civilians only so far as is genuinely feasible, and in Gaza that margin is close to nothing. And Israel embeds its own military in its own population as a matter of course — universal conscription, army bases inside towns, the defence ministry in the heart of Tel Aviv, armed civilian-defence squads living in the border kibbutzim. If the mere proximity of soldiers to civilians were the crime, both sides would stand convicted of it. It is not the crime. The deliberate use of civilians as shields is the crime, and it must be proven, not assumed. Israel’s right to defend its people, and the reality of the crime committed against them, are not in doubt and will not be minimised here.⁵⁵
But here the one standard arrives for Israel exactly as it arrived, a moment ago, for Hamas — and the symmetry is the entire purpose of placing these two cases side by side. The right of self-defence is not a permission to do anything whatever in its name. It is bounded by the same two principles that bound Hamas: distinction and proportionality. A state defending itself may strike military targets; it may not deliberately or indiscriminately kill civilians, and it may not inflict civilian harm out of all proportion to the military advantage sought. And the human-shields argument, tested by the same rule applied to Hamas’s claims, does not do what Israel needs it to do. It is a settled principle of the law of war that the presence of fighters among civilians — even the unlawful presence of an enemy using civilians as cover — does not strip those civilians of their protection, and does not transfer to the attacker a permission to kill them in whatever numbers. The shield’s wrong does not become the attacker’s licence. Where Hamas fought from among civilians, that is Hamas’s crime; it does not retroactively make lawful the killing of those same civilians by the thousand. An argument that is true in part — yes, Hamas embeds itself among civilians — is here being asked to carry a conclusion it cannot bear: that this therefore excuses whatever follows. It does not, in the same way and for the same reason that the justice of the Palestinian cause did not excuse the massacre at the Nova music festival.
There is also a threshold question the law has genuinely not settled, and honesty requires naming it rather than choosing the convenient side. When the International Court of Justice considered the matter in 2004, it reasoned that the right of self-defence under Article 51 contemplates an armed attack by one state against another, and noted that the threat to Israel emanated from territory under Israel’s own control — leaving it open to argument whether the classic right of self-defence even applies to an occupying power acting against the territory it occupies. Other serious lawyers reject that reasoning, pointing to Security Council resolutions that recognise self-defence against non-state actors, and to the genuine dispute over whether Gaza was under Israel’s effective control on the day. There is an irony here that the one standard will not let pass: Israel spent the years before 7 October insisting that Gaza was no longer occupied — a claim it made to escape the duties of an occupying power, and one that contradicts both its conduct and the Court’s own findings. It is a trap of Israel’s own making, and there is no way out of it. If Gaza was occupied, the Court’s reasoning bites and the classic right of self-defence is doubtful. If Gaza was not occupied — Israel’s own position — then Israel has spent the years since conducting itself there as an occupying army anyway, controlling the territory’s borders, its movement, and its food, in ways unlawful on their own terms. The two rights are not contested in the same way: the Palestinian right to resist an occupation is settled at its foundation and disputed only at its edges, over which means are permitted; Israel’s right to the response it has mounted in the name of self-defence — a siege and a war that have reached into the West Bank as well — is disputed at its root. This article does not need to resolve what the lawyers have not, because the point holds whichever way the question falls. It does not matter how strong the right is. A right to defend yourself is not a right to punish a people.⁵⁶
The conduct is the question. And the conduct is the subject of what comes next. Whether the response Israel chose in Gaza — the scale of the killing, the destruction of the conditions of life, the starvation as policy — crossed from lawful self-defence into the gravest crimes the law knows is the matter now before the International Court of Justice, where a genocide case proceeds against Israel, and it is the finding of a United Nations commission of inquiry that acts of genocide have been committed. To weigh that evidence is the work of Part III, and this article will not pre-empt its own verdict here. What belongs here is only the principle, stated with the same plainness used against Hamas: a real right of self-defence does not license an unlimited response, any more than a real grievance licenses the murder of civilians. The cause does not sanctify the method on either side. That is the whole of the law, and it is the whole of the point.
So the verdict on the Israeli case, in the same form and the same words used for the other. The right is real: a state attacked as Israel was attacked has the right to defend its people. The crime against it was real: 7 October was a war crime committed against Israeli civilians, and the hostages remain a crime today. And none of that licenses the response, which the law does not permit and which Part III will examine in full — and saying so does not deny Israel the right to any lawful defence, within the limits that bind every state. The right is real and the response is unlawful. Both are true. Neither cancels the other. It is the same verdict, the same law, that judged Hamas in the section before. There is only one law here. It applies to every party, or it is not law at all.⁵⁷
Closing — Why Part III Matters
Part II of this series set out to answer one question: why. Why did 7 October happen — not what occurred on the day, which was the work of Part I, but what made the day possible — the conditions that built up across the decades until something broke. The answer is not a single cause but a sequence, and the sequence is the argument of everything above. A people dispossessed in 1948 and never allowed to settle the account. An occupation that hardened from a military administration into a permanent system of control, named apartheid first by Israelis themselves. A peace process that was not one — a screen behind which the land was eaten settlement by settlement until the state being negotiated could no longer be built. A territory sealed and metered to the edge of hunger. And, holding it all in place, a deliberate policy of keeping Hamas alive, because a living enemy in Gaza was the surest guarantee that no Palestinian state would ever be born. None of this excuses what Hamas did on 7 October. All of it explains why something was always going to come.
There is one question Part II has deliberately left open. It has set out the long causes, and held both cases to international law evenly — but it stops short of fully addressing the war Israel launched, because that demands an accounting of its own. Whether what Israel has done since 7 October crossed from the lawful defence of a wronged nation into the gravest crimes the law knows; whether the case now before the International Court of Justice, and the finding of the United Nations that acts of genocide have been committed, will stand; what accountability would mean, and what a settlement that did not simply reset the conditions for the next war would require — that is the work of Part III. It is the part where the law stops describing and starts judging.
And it returns to the man this part keeps coming back to, because the history keeps coming back to him. Benjamin Netanyahu stood on the balcony in Jerusalem above the crowd that wanted Rabin dead, and rode the murder into office. He ran out the clock on every negotiation that might have produced a Palestinian state, and boasted of having killed the Oslo accords. He kept Hamas funded and standing for the better part of two decades, and sent his spy chief abroad to keep the money flowing. And on the morning of 7 October 2023, he was the prime minister of Israel, presiding over the worst security failure in the country’s history — and resisting, ever since, the independent inquiry that the victims’ families, the security chiefs, and most of the Israeli public have demanded into how it happened. Part III will ask the question the official story has worked hardest to avoid: whether the catastrophe that began this war was only a failure, or whether it was the predictable end of everything that came before it — and whether the man who built that everything can be allowed to write its history.
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Image: Khadijeh Bsharat and her daughters on the ruins of their home, Khirbet Humsah, Jordan Valley, 27 August 2015. Photo: 'Aref Daraghmeh / B'Tselem, licensed under CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.
© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press
Endnotes
¹ Justin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate (Columbia University Press, 1990); see also the Ottoman census data summarised in palquest, “Demography and the Palestine Question (I),” Institute for Palestine Studies.
² The text of the Balfour Declaration is reproduced in Israeli and British government archives; see also Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (Norton, 2000); James Barr, A Line in the Sand (Norton, 2012).
³ Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine (Macmillan, 1984); Yad Vashem, “The Transfer Agreement and the Boycott Movement: A Jewish Dilemma on the Eve of the Holocaust”; entries on the Haavara Agreement in the Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust.
⁴ White Paper of 1939, Cmd. 6019, the text reproduced at the Avalon Project, Yale Law School; on the Anglo-American Committee, Bevin’s rejection of its recommendations, and the Exodus 1947, see Howard Sachar, A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time (Knopf, 2007); on Bevin’s recorded remarks, see Phillip Whitehead and others, Mandate100: The “Antisemite Ernest Bevin” and the day Britain recognised the State of Israel, Fathom Journal.
⁵ United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 (II), 29 November 1947, Future Government of Palestine; UN Special Committee on Palestine, Report to the General Assembly, A/364, 3 September 1947.
⁶ Walid Khalidi, “Revisiting the UNGA Partition Resolution,” Journal of Palestine Studies XXVII, no. 1 (Autumn 1997); UN Special Committee on Palestine, Report, A/364, 1947; population and land-ownership figures cross-checked against the Survey of Palestine, prepared for the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, December 1945–January 1946.
⁷ Charter of the United Nations, Article 1(2); International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, common Article 1; International Court of Justice, Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Advisory Opinion, 9 July 2004, and Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, Advisory Opinion, 19 July 2024, both affirming the right of self-determination as an obligation erga omnes. On the non-binding character of General Assembly recommendations, see Charter Article 10.
⁸ The UN statistical estimate of approximately 711,000 appears in the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine, General Progress Report and Supplementary Report, A/1367/Rev.1, 1951. Benny Morris’s range of 600,000–760,000 is given in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Walid Khalidi, ed., All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992), documents 418 villages; Salman Abu-Sitta, The Atlas of Palestine 1917–1966 (Palestine Land Society, 2010), brings the figure above 500.
⁹ Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld, 2006); Walid Khalidi, “Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine,” Journal of Palestine Studies 18, no. 1 (1988); Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 164–165, where Plan Dalet is described as “a strategic-ideological anchor and basis for expulsions.” The characterisation of the dispute as one over central premeditation rather than over the fact of expulsion reflects the positions of both historians in their published work.
¹⁰ On the toll and its inflation, see the study by Sharif Kanaana and Nihad Zaytuni, Deir Yassin, Destroyed Palestinian Villages Documentation Project, Monograph No. 4 (Birzeit University, 1987), which established the figure of 107 from interviews with survivors; on the wartime exaggeration and its acknowledgement, see the BBC interview with Hazem Nusseibeh, Palestine Broadcasting Service, recounted in The Fifty Years War: Israel and the Arabs (BBC, 1998). On the demographic effect, see Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge University Press, 1988).
¹¹ Representative works of the New Historians: Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (1988; revised 2004); Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006); Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (Norton, 2000); Tom Segev, 1949: The First Israelis (Free Press, 1986).
¹² United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 (III), 11 December 1948, paragraph 11. On the contested legal status, see, for the restrictive reading, the analysis published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs; for the affirmative reading, BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, and the linkage to self-determination in UN General Assembly Resolution 3236 (1974). Ben-Gurion’s June 1948 cabinet position against return is documented in Morris, Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited.
¹³ Estimates of 800,000–900,000 are given in, among others, the World Jewish Congress and the records of the UK Parliament (Hansard, 19 June 2019); on the mixed mechanisms and the role of Zionist organisations in facilitating the migration, see Esther Meir-Glitzenstein, Zionism in an Arab Country: Jews in Iraq in the 1940s (Routledge, 2004), and the historiography surveyed in Wikipedia, “Jewish exodus from the Muslim world.” On the Farhud, see Edwin Black, The Farhud: Roots of the Arab–Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust (Dialog Press, 2010).
¹⁴ On the Qibya raid, the toll, and the destruction, see the report of the UN Mixed Armistice Commission delivered to the Security Council, October 1953, and UN Security Council Resolution 101, 24 November 1953. UN observers found bodies in the doorways of the demolished houses and bullet marks on the doors, indicating that residents had been kept inside as the buildings were dynamited over them. The raid was carried out by Unit 101 under Ariel Sharon; see Benny Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, 1949–1956 (Clarendon Press, 1993). On Ben-Gurion’s public denial of army involvement, see the contemporaneous account in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, October 1953.
¹⁵ United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, 22 November 1967. On the deliberate omission of the definite article in the English text and the divergence from the French “des territoires,” see the drafting recollections of Lord Caradon and Arthur Goldberg, and the analysis in the American Journal of International Law 71, no. 2 (1977), “The Authoritativeness of the English and French Texts of Security Council Resolution 242.” Displacement figures for 1967 from the UN and standard reference works; the standard range is 280,000–325,000.
¹⁶ Basic Law: Jerusalem, Capital of Israel, passed by the Knesset 30 July 1980; on the Supreme Court’s reading of the law as annexation, see the discussion in the Jerusalem Law entry of standard legal references. United Nations Security Council Resolution 478, 20 August 1980, adopted 14–0 with the United States abstaining, declaring the law “null and void” and a violation of international law.
¹⁷ Golda Meir, interview with Frank Giles, Sunday Times, 15 June 1969; also carried in The Washington Post, 16 June 1969. The “land without a people for a people without a land” formula predates Meir and is associated with nineteenth-century Christian Zionist usage.
¹⁸ Palestinian National Charter (1968), Articles 9 and 10, text at the Avalon Project, Yale Law School. On the 1993 exchange of letters, the 24 April 1996 PNC vote (504–54), the Article 33 two-thirds question, and the December 1998 Gaza meeting, see the Palestinian National Covenant entry of standard references and Geoffrey Watson, The Oslo Accords: International Law and the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Agreements (Oxford, 2000).
¹⁹ Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), 18 August 1988, Articles 22 and 32, text at the Avalon Project, Yale Law School. On the Tsarist-police origins and forgery of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, see Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide (1967), and the exposure of the forgery by The Times of London in 1921.
²⁰ 1988 Covenant, Article 7. The hadith appears in the collections of al-Bukhari and Muslim within the apocalyptic (malāḥim) and “signs of the Hour” literature. For the classification of this material as eschatological narration rather than juridical command, see standard works on Islamic eschatology; the contrast drawn here is between that genre and the European conspiracy material of Articles 22 and 32.
²¹ Hamas, A Document of General Principles and Policies, May 2017. On the Likud platform: original Likud Party platform, 1977, “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty,” documented via the Jewish Virtual Library and multiple reference sources; the platform has not been formally rescinded.
²² Coalition agreements of the government sworn in December 2022, asserting an “exclusive right” of the Jewish people to the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan; see the summary in the Congressional Research Service report, Israel: Major Issues and U.S. Relations. On Bennett’s stated opposition to a Palestinian state, see his remarks reported by The Times of Israel, 2026.
²³ The asymmetry described here — denial of peoplehood versus denial of a state, and the differential capacity to enact denial through control of territory — is developed at greater length in the author’s The Greatest Antisemitism, Fireline Press.
²⁴ Settler population figures of approximately 750,000 (West Bank and East Jerusalem combined) are drawn from UN reporting, Peace Now, and contemporaneous press as of 2025–2026; the figure rose from under 200,000 in 2000. On settlement expansion reaching its highest level since 2017 and the 2025 “state property” designation, see UN OCHA reporting and Al Jazeera, December 2025. The prohibition on transfer of an occupying power’s civilian population is Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
²⁵ On the two legal systems, see Human Rights Watch, A Threshold Crossed (27 April 2021), and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, One Rule, Two Legal Systems (2014). Conviction rates in the Israeli military courts are documented by Addameer and B’Tselem. The 2018 Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People declares the right of national self-determination “exclusive to the Jewish people.”
²⁶ Area C, under full Israeli control, constitutes approximately 60 per cent of the West Bank. On the separation barrier (712 km, more than twice the length of the Green Line, much of its route inside the West Bank), see UN OCHA and the ICJ advisory opinion of 9 July 2004, Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
²⁷ On administrative detention, see B’Tselem, Statistics on Administrative Detention: approximately 3,350–3,474 Palestinians held without charge or trial as of late 2025, on the basis of secret evidence, in indefinitely renewable six-month periods.
²⁸ International Court of Justice, Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, Advisory Opinion, 19 July 2024. The Court found Israel’s presence unlawful (11–4) and set out the consequences (14–1), grounding the illegality in the prohibition on acquisition of territory by force and the right to self-determination, and finding a breach of Article 3 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.
²⁹ B’Tselem, A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is Apartheid (12 January 2021); Yesh Din legal opinion (June 2020); Human Rights Watch, A Threshold Crossed (27 April 2021); Amnesty International, Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians (1 February 2022); joint statement of thirteen Israeli human rights organisations defending the designation, February 2022.
³⁰ On settler violence since 7 October 2023: OCHA recorded 1,828 settler attacks resulting in casualties or property damage across the West Bank in 2025 — the highest annual total since it began documenting such incidents in 2006, up from 1,449 in 2024 and 1,291 in 2023. On displacement, OCHA attributes the record 2025 West Bank total of roughly 37,000 chiefly to Israeli military operations in the northern refugee camps of Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nur Shams, with several thousand more displaced specifically by settler violence and access restrictions. On impunity, see Yesh Din’s finding that the large majority of investigations into settler attacks close without indictment. This material is documented in detail in Part I of this series.
³¹ On the 2005 disengagement (approximately 8,000 settlers, 21 settlements), see Britannica and standard references. Dov Weisglass’s “formaldehyde” remarks were made in an interview with Ari Shavit, Haaretz, October 2004.
³² On Gaza’s continued status as occupied territory after 2005 — by virtue of Israeli control over airspace, coastline, population registry, and crossings — see the affirmations of the UN, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the International Court of Justice advisory opinion of 19 July 2024, which held that Israel’s withdrawal did not release it from its obligations as an occupying power.
³³ On the blockade imposed in 2007, the reduction of imports to a “humanitarian minimum,” and the halting of exports as a stated policy of “economic warfare” and of separating Gaza from the West Bank, see the Blockade of the Gaza Strip documentation and Gisha’s reporting. More than 400 truckloads entered daily before June 2007.
³⁴ “Food Consumption in the Gaza Strip — Red Lines,” Israeli Ministry of Defence / COGAT document dated January 2008, released October 2012 after a legal battle by Gisha; figure of 2,279 calories per person per day and the “106 trucks” model. See Gisha, Reader: “Food Consumption in the Gaza Strip — Red Lines” (October 2012), and Haaretz, 17 October 2012. COGAT stated the document was a draft never used as a basis for policy; the quotas in force matched its figures.
³⁵ Combined Palestinian deaths across Operation Cast Lead (2008–09), Pillar of Defence (2012), Protective Edge (2014), and Guardian of the Walls (2021) total approximately 4,000, against roughly 100 Israelis; figures from UN OCHA and B’Tselem. On the correspondence between Gaza Health Ministry tallies and Israeli figures across these operations (divergences in single-digit percentages), see the analysis reported by Haaretz, 2026.
³⁶ Efraim Inbar and Eitan Shamir, “’Mowing the Grass’: Israel’s Strategy for Protracted Intractable Conflict,” Journal of Strategic Studies 37, no. 1 (2014): 65–90; and Inbar and Shamir, “Mowing the Grass in Gaza,” Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, Perspectives Paper No. 255, 20 July 2014.
³⁷ Pre-October 2023 indicators: on water, UN OCHA (2022) found approximately 97 per cent of aquifer water unfit for human consumption; on poverty and unemployment (roughly two-thirds in poverty, approximately 45 per cent of the workforce unemployed before the war), see UNCTAD assessments. On restriction of “dual-use” equipment affecting some 70 per cent of water and sanitation materials, see UN OCHA.
³⁸ On the Oslo Accords (1993, 1995): the Declaration of Principles and the Interim Agreement established the Palestinian Authority and the Area A/B/C division; the phrase “Palestinian state” does not appear. On the near-doubling of the West Bank settler population from roughly 110,000 to over 190,000 between 1993 and 2000, see B’Tselem and Peace Now. Yitzhak Shamir’s remark about prolonging autonomy talks while settling half a million Jews was made after his 1992 electoral defeat; Netanyahu’s 2001 remark to settlers in Ofra that he had “de facto put an end to the Oslo Accords” was filmed and later broadcast by Israel’s Channel 10 (2010).
³⁹ Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated on 4 November 1995 by Yigal Amir, a far-right Israeli ultranationalist opposed to the Oslo Accords. On the climate of incitement preceding the murder — rallies branding Rabin a traitor and Nazi, images of him in SS uniform and in a coffin, and Netanyahu’s presence on the balcony above the Zion Square crowd, together with the Shin Bet chief’s request that he moderate the rhetoric — see the contemporaneous record and the Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin documentation. The further charge of complicity has been made by Israeli political figures and denied by Netanyahu; it is noted here as contested, not asserted.
⁴⁰ On the actual terms of the Camp David offer (annexation of roughly 9 per cent including the Ariel bloc, the contiguity problem, Jordan Valley and airspace control, contested Jerusalem sovereignty, no meaningful right of return), see the analysis of the Israeli peace group Gush Shalom and the account of US negotiator Robert Malley and Hussein Agha, “Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors,” New York Review of Books, 2001. Shlomo Ben-Ami’s remark was made on Democracy Now! in 2006 and reflects the argument of his Scars of War, Wounds of Peace (2006).
⁴¹ For the Israeli account, see Benny Morris’s interview with Ehud Barak, “Camp David and After,” New York Review of Books, 2002, and Dennis Ross, The Missing Peace (2004).
⁴² On the Taba talks (21–27 January 2001), the proximity to agreement, and their termination by the Israeli electoral timetable and Sharon’s subsequent refusal to resume, see the Moratinos non-paper (published in Haaretz, February 2001) and the Taba Summit record. For the counter-argument that no agreement was genuinely in prospect, see the analysis published in The National Interest (2003).
⁴³ On the 2008 Olmert proposal (approximately 93.7 per cent of the West Bank with a 5.8 per cent swap and a Gaza–West Bank corridor), and on Olmert’s status as a lame-duck premier under criminal investigation with Livni undercutting him, see the account of Palestinian negotiating-team adviser Khaled Elgindy and the memoir of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. On the contested calculation of the swap percentages, see the Israeli–Palestinian peace process documentation.
⁴⁴ The legal baseline referenced — a contiguous sovereign state on the territory occupied in 1967, with a capital in East Jerusalem — follows from the right of self-determination and the prohibition on acquisition of territory by force, as set out in the ICJ opinions of 2004 and 2024 (see notes 7 and 28 above).
⁴⁵ Netanyahu’s remarks to Likud Knesset members, March 2019, reported in Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post (12 March 2019).
⁴⁶ The sourcing of the 2019 remark has been questioned by some pro-Israel outlets, which trace it to a secondary account rather than a direct transcript of the meeting. Netanyahu characterised it as a misquote in his interview with Time (2024); in the course of that interview the words were read to him and he defended the policy they described rather than denying the statement. It is treated here as established on the strength of that response and of the corroborating record set out below.
⁴⁷ Bezalel Smotrich’s 2015 characterisation of the PA as a “burden” and Hamas as an “asset”; Gershon Hacohen’s 2019 interview (”Openly Hamas is an enemy. Covertly, it’s an ally”); Ehud Barak, Israel Army Radio, August 2019 (”alive and kicking”); Ehud Olmert, interview with Politico, 2023. Compiled in the Times of Israel, “For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas” (October 2023), and in standard reference material on the subject.
⁴⁸ On the Qatari cash: approved by Israel’s security cabinet in August 2018; monthly transfers of approximately $15 million (and by some accounts up to $30 million) in cash-filled suitcases through Israeli-controlled crossings from 2018 until October 2023. See CNN, “Qatar sent millions to Gaza for years – with Israel’s backing” (December 2023), and +972 Magazine, interview with historian Adam Raz (November 2024). On the humanitarian-versus-strategic debate, see Amos Harel’s contemporaneous analysis in Haaretz (2018).
⁴⁹ On the February 2020 mission of Mossad chief Yossi Cohen and a senior general to Qatar, and the September 2023 visit by Mossad chief David Barnea, see standard reference material and Israeli press. On the report that Israel asked Qatar to increase funds approximately a month before 7 October, see Haaretz (2 January 2026).
⁵⁰ Netanyahu has called the funding charge “ridiculous” and characterised the 2019 quotation as a misquote (Time, 2024); his office states he was never shown intelligence that the funds were diverted to terror, and he attributes Hamas’s military build-up to smuggling through Sinai. Israeli security officials’ contemporaneous warnings that the funding strengthened Hamas militarily are documented in Haaretz (2 January 2026) and the Shin Bet review of the events of 7 October (March 2025).
⁵¹ Hamas’s stated rationale appears in the speech of Mohammed Deif on 7 October 2023, in subsequent statements by Khaled Meshaal and others, and in the document published by the Hamas Media Office, “Our Narrative… Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” (January 2024), which states the operation targeted military sites and sought to capture soldiers for a prisoner exchange. On the motive of derailing Israeli–Saudi normalisation, see captured Hamas documents analysed by Israeli research bodies and contemporaneous reporting; these are recorded here as Hamas’s stated reasons, not as endorsement.
⁵² On the 2011 Gilad Shalit exchange — 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, including 280 serving life sentences, for one captured Israeli soldier — see the standard record of the deal. It remains the largest such exchange in Israel’s history.
⁵³ On the principle of distinction and the prohibition on targeting civilians and on hostage-taking as war crimes, see customary international humanitarian law, common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, and Additional Protocol I. The deliberate killing of civilians on 7 October, and the falsity of Hamas’s claim not to have targeted civilians, are documented in Part I of this series; on Hamas officials’ subsequent statements, see the interview remarks of Ghazi Hamad and Mousa Abu Marzook (October 2023).
⁵⁴ On the casualty and hostage figures of 7 October, see Part I of this series. The “no state would tolerate this” formulation echoes statements by Israeli and allied leaders; the historical analogies (Allied strategic bombing, the response to the 11 September 2001 attacks) are recurring features of Israel’s public case.
⁵⁵ On the legal responsibility of a party that fights from within a civilian population, and on the prohibition on the use of human shields, see Additional Protocol I, Articles 51 and 58, and customary international humanitarian law. The same body of law holds that the presence of combatants among civilians does not release the attacking party from its obligations of distinction and proportionality.
⁵⁶ International Court of Justice, Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Advisory Opinion, 9 July 2004, paragraph 139. For the contrary view that self-defence under Article 51 extends to attacks by non-state actors, see UN Security Council Resolutions 1368 and 1373 (2001) and the analyses published by the US Army War College and others. On Israel’s pre-2023 position that Gaza was not occupied, and its tension with the ICJ’s 2024 finding, see note 32 above.
⁵⁷ The genocide proceedings — Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel) — remain before the International Court of Justice, which indicated provisional measures in January, March, and May 2024; Israel filed its counter-memorial in March 2026. The United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry found, on 16 September 2025, that acts of genocide had been committed in Gaza. The full weight of this evidence is the subject of Part III of this series.